Divining Responsibility
by Col. Dan Smith
www.dissidentvoice.org
July 3, 2004



 

In a fitting end to the week-long national retrospective of the life of actor-governor-president Ronald Reagan, his three surviving children -- Michael, Patti, and Ron Jr. -- recalled his most important role: as their father and, by extension, as a husband.

Ron, speaking last, also touched on his father’s religious sense and sensibility, describing him as “a deeply, unabashedly religious man.” The son noted that, in the wake of John Hinckley’s assassination attempt, President Reagan believed “God had spared him in order that he might do good. But,” Ron added, “he accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate. And there is a profound difference.”

For a presidential candidate who carried 44 states in 1980 and then 49 states in 1984, the pressure to abandon this distinction must have been severe -- and there were instances during the two Reagan terms in which the distinction was not evident. Nonetheless, reflecting his private conviction as described by Ron Jr., President Reagan in his public life displayed neither the “imperial” mode of governance favored by Richard Nixon nor the apostolic-apocalyptic tenor of the current Bush administration.

One source of pressure was the eight year old Heritage Foundation, a staunchly conservative Washington-based “think tank.” In 1981, it published its first “Mandate for Leadership,” an unsolicited guide for organizing the new administration. This publication was so detailed – it contained more than 2,000 policy recommendations – that the Washington Post referred to it as a “bible” for the Reagan team.

Twenty years later, on January 29, 2001, Heritage published its latest version for the Bush administration that purported to translate “two mandates from the American people – a mandate to make their government function more effectively, and a mandate to implement the broadly conservative agenda favored by most Americans, from better education based on parental control to effective protection from missile attack.”

Unlike with Reagan, however, Heritage’s assumption implicit in its volume’s title -- “mandate” -- cannot be conferred on George W. Bush, who failed to gain a majority of the popular votes cast in the November 2000 ballot and who confronts a public split almost 50-50 “pro and con” the administration.

All the above suggests the importance of “fleshing out” the distinction Ron Jr. drew between mandate and responsibility, a distinction critical to the continuing health of our representative form of government.

A logical place to start -- one greatly favored by Pentagon and other administration lawyers looking for explanations to circumvent the Geneva Conventions -- is with dictionary definitions.

In terms of governance, “mandate” is defined as “the wishes of constituents expressed to a representative, legislator, etc. as an order, or regarded as an order” (Webster’s) [1]; as “a command or an authorization given by a political electorate to its representative”; or “the commission” [2] -- the act of granting authority to undertake certain functions -- “that is given to a government and its policies through an electoral victory.” (www.thefreedictionary.com)

Webster’s entry is notable for its caveat that a mandate involves a sense that the constituency’s expressed wishes are or are regarded as orders. This is important from the perspective of the mandate giver as well as the mandate receiver. In elections, the traditional measure of whether the giver (the voting public) has bestowed a “mandate” is the number of ballots the winner has vis-à-vis other candidates; the greater the differential, the “stronger” the mandate. And while pundits can wax eloquent about the objective numbers, they are on less solid ground in trying to identify which of the winner’s issue positions (or combination of positions) attracted voters. [3]

A growing trend in U.S. electoral politics is the claim of receiving a mandate when, obviously, none has been bestowed. Such assertiveness is reminiscent of the Chinese concept of the “mandate from heaven” which each emperor claimed for himself precisely because he had bested all the other contenders for the post. But while there was no “independent” way to determine if the mandate actually had been bestowed, there was an objective way to know when it was withdrawn: the emperor was replaced by someone else. [4]

Psychologically, “responsibility” is totally different. While mandate involves the transfer and accretion of power in the ruler, responsibility emphasizes service. Again, the dictionaries provide the common meaning of the term: “the condition, quality, fact or instance of being responsible, accountable, or liable”; or “a duty, an obligation, or a burden.” [5]

Obviously, “responsibility,” unlike “mandate,” has no necessary or overt political implications. But when placed in the political context of western democracy, the definition of “responsibility” as a duty or burden points directly to the idea of the leader as servant of or “in the service of” the people. This duality is conceptually reinforced by the reality that while leadership is sought, it cannot be “accepted” until conferred – a reciprocal relationship initiated by the public which may be reversed by the same public.

There is a non-western tradition that a person who rescues another from death, because “fate” is thereby thwarted, becomes responsible, however reluctantly, for the future welfare of the one rescued. The parallel in political terms are the successful candidates who proclaim, quite willingly and willfully, a mandate as rescuer of the nation from some “threatening” fate. The ever-present temptation in combining the mantle of leader with the self-image of national “savior” is to demand increasing freedom of action to “secure” the nation’s future welfare. Left unchecked, all sense of accountability -- that is, responsibility -- atrophies, and the burden that the leader-as-servant should bear can become a yoke on the necks of the people.

It has been said that responsibility is not a leadership option but a leadership obligation. But responsibility also is an obligation -- the general burden -- shared by all who reside in a democratic society, for a functioning democracy requires the participation of the public in choosing what is to be done. The true leader does not rely on an overbearing “mandate” but offers and explains a direction to be taken, aware (to the extent possible) of the consequences -- the burden accepted and the options foregone -- of the choice that is made.

Some -- even many -- of President Reagan’s policy choices were and remain highly controversial. Yet, having accepted the public’s offer of the presidency, he also accepted responsibility for judgments made and actions taken. This is the image of the “good leader-servant,” whose appeal rests on the instinctive acceptance of the equal worth of every person.

It is the image evoked by Ron Reagan Jr. in his eulogy.

Col. Daniel Smith, a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran, is Senior Fellow on Military Affairs at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker lobby in the public interest. He can be reached at: dan@fcnl.org. 

REFERENCES

1) Webster’s Deluxe Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition, 1979 (p. 1092).

2) The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition, 1992, matches this definition verbatim (p. 1091)

3) Two traps exist in this regard. One is that the putative mandator is merely thinking aloud or simply expressing a whim or frustration. The second lies with putative mandatees who, overhearing a superior’s fleeting thought, misinterpret it as an order or take it upon themselves to act so as to obtain a reward of some type. A classic example is the slaying of Thomas a’ Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, on December 29, 1170 after Henry II became enraged by Becket’s defiance of the monarch.

4) The current President Bush’s belief that God chose him to be president in these times – that he has a mission to govern – replicates the self-proclamation of the rulers of the Middle Kingdom that they ruled by virtue of divine mandate.

5) Op. cit., Webster’s (p. 1979) and American Heritage (p. 1992).
 

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